To Be Seen
Copyright© 2025 by Heel
Chapter 1
On Christmas Eve, the city wore its brightness like a promise.
She left her apartment just after dusk, when the sky was neither day nor night but a thinning blue, stretched pale and fragile above the rooftops. The hallway mirror waited for her as it always did, narrow and unforgiving, but she passed it without slowing. She did not need confirmation of what she already knew. The woman reflected there had never been the kind people remembered. She was ordinary in ways that resisted poetry.
Outside, the cold met her first—sharp, clean, awake. The streets shimmered with strings of lights looped from building to building, their glow softening the concrete and steel. Storefront windows displayed carefully arranged warmth: scarves folded just so, mugs promising comfort, mannequins caught mid-laugh in lives that never moved forward. Music drifted from somewhere unseen, a familiar carol slowed enough to feel heavy with longing.
She joined the crowd.
It was easy to disappear on nights like this. People were focused inward—on lists, on loved ones, on the small urgencies that filled their hands and heads. She had perfected the art of being passed without pause. Her shoulders angled just enough to avoid attention, her stride steady but unremarkable. She did not demand space, and so the world rarely gave it to her.
She had made peace with that. Or at least she believed she had.
She knew she was not beautiful. The thought carried no drama, no ache sharp enough to wound. It was simply a fact, like knowing your voice would never carry in a crowd or your name would not be spoken twice in the same room. Beauty, whatever it truly was, lived elsewhere—on other women, in other lives. She had stopped measuring herself against it long ago.
Yet that morning, while folding paper around a single gift, the thought had appeared—quiet, persistent, impossible to shake.
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